Corporate Advocacy Program: The best way to manage and repair your business reputation. Hiding negative complaints is only a Band-Aid. Consumers want to see how businesses take care of business. All businesses will get complaints. How those businesses take care of those complaints is what separates good businesses from bad businesses.

My company used USA Mobility's paging service for many years. A few months ago, I started getting complaints from customers that I was not returning their pages. (I use the pager as my primary contact method for customers.) My company is very small and we provide emergency engineering services. In other words, we need to be reached when we are needed, not days, weeks or months later.

After getting enough complaints, I started periodically testing my pager myself. After about 10 days, I was able to determine that it worked in the Twin Cities metro area, but not at my home. As I work out of my home office, that was a big problem. I called USA Mobility (unfortunately, I didn't check this website first) and they suggested sending a new pager. A week later a new pager showed up. It performed exactly the same way. It didn't work at my home. (The pager used to work here.) Over several days and many telephone-tag calls to the customer service/technical people (who were pleasant and professional) it was finally determined that "changes they had made to their transmitters" (i.e. reduced coverage area) was the cause of the problem. Next was to see if they could CORRECT the problem and re-activate the transmitter(s) that were turned off or re-routed. Several days later the answer was NO. Then we asked if the phone number would be released to another pager company so our PRIMARY CONTACT METHOD with our customer base was not lost. The customer service person had to first see if they "owned" that number or not... A few days later we learned yes, they owned that block of numbers, but NO it would not be released to a competitor. Result? We have a pager that doesn't work where we need it to (they reduced the coverage without notifying us)... To add insult to injury, we're expected to PAY THE SHIPPING to return both the pagers. They [supposedly] are going to refund us the 2 months (more?) of reduced coverage cost. But our costs were much higher than the $10/mo. service fee. And we still have to find another pager company.

We were good, loyal clients - always paid on time. The problem with USA Mobility is that they don't care about the individual customer and how their actions affect them. Two things they should have done (1) notified customers that changes MAY affect their coverage and offer solutions BEFORE the changes were made, (2) if sufficient solutions were not found, to give adequate time to find alternate solutions BEFORE LOSING COVERAGE!!, (3) offer to "port" the phone numbers to other companies who do maintain coverage in the areas that USA Mobility was abandoning.

Very very poor customer service. Yes, the phone-support personnel were pleasant and professional. We'll see if the refund comes through in a timely manner or not. Other reports about USA Mobility make me wonder if we'll see it at all.

Our company is an engineering firm -- it scares me to think of medical professionals or government (FEMA?) emergency personnel RELYING on this pager company's service. We lost some business income and a bunch of time --- makes me wonder if any LIVES were lost due to "holes in pager coverage" of emerency service professionals using USA Mobility pagers.

Corporate Advocacy Program: The best way to manage and repair your business reputation. Hiding negative complaints is only a Band-Aid. Consumers want to see how businesses take care of business. All businesses will get complaints. How those businesses take care of those complaints is what separates good businesses from bad businesses.

AUTHOR: Shotsandgoggles - (United States of America)

SUBMITTED: Thursday, November 08, 2012

POSTED: Thursday, November 08, 2012

I know exactly what this customer has gone through with USA Mobility and their so called "coverage updates" / "low impact shut downs" I find it very troublesome that someone would suggest Direct Page when they are a reseller for USA Mobility and use the same programming. What a joke it's right there on their website when you look up paging coverage they use USA Mobility and American Messaging Services. I found a great company that doesn't charge me a fee every time I need assistance and their customer service is outstanding. I will never use USA Mobility again EVER, nor would I use or suggest a company that resells for them.

AUTHOR: JamesA - (United States of America)

SUBMITTED: Sunday, October 09, 2011

POSTED: Sunday, October 09, 2011

I too was using a USA Mobility pager but purchased it from one of their authorized resellers that markets the pagers on the internet...Directpage.com When my pager started not receiving in areas that previously worked fine, I contacted directpage.com and advised them of the situation. They were aware of USA Mobility's "network grooming" (fancy term for removing transmitters) in some areas and advised that most of the customers affected by this have selected to go with their message carbon copy option. Directpage reprogrammed the pager phone number so that pages would be sent to my cell phone. The pages can be sent as either a text message, email or in my case, I use an Apple iPhone 4 and downloaded the pager app and have the pages redirected to the pager app. It works great as my iPhone works in areas that the pager stopped working and I still retain the privacy and urgency that the pager phone number provides. Since many customers have my pager phone number and I didn't want to give it up, this solution worked best for me and I like not having to carry 1990's pager on my belt anymore. Directpage also told me that pager phone numbers are not transportable like landline and cell numbers so trying another paging carrier using the same pager phone number was not even an option. If I chose to go with another carrier, I would have had to swap out my pager and get a new number. Essentially, since pager use has dropped by over 90% in the past 15 years, paging carriers are removing transmitters from areas that have little to no pager usage and since I already carry a phone, the message carbon copy made sense plus now I get my pages nationwide without needing to pay for extended range service.

AUTHOR: Bruce M. - (USA)

SUBMITTED: Thursday, December 03, 2009

POSTED: Thursday, December 03, 2009

After several months of unusable paging service (the pager didn't work in the original area -- the company reduced the service area without notifiying its customers; see original report for details), we DID receive a refund for ONE month of service and they cancelled the contract. Better than nothing, but no where near the fair thing to do. The fair thing would have been to contact the customers BEFORE the service area was reduced, to allow us time to find a new paging company. We have no idea how many pages we didn't receive or how much business was lost. Paging is the primary way to reach us. USA Mobility DID provide a small refund and cancelled our account without hassle, but the damage had already been done. I would not recommend this company for paging services. They just don't care about the impact of their actions on their customers.

Corporate Advocacy Program: The best way to manage and repair your business reputation. Hiding negative complaints is only a Band-Aid. Consumers want to see how businesses take care of business. All businesses will get complaints. How those businesses take care of those complaints is what separates good businesses from bad businesses.